#BlogTour ‘Pine’ by Francine Toon

About the book…

They are driving home from the search party when they see her. The trees are coarse and tall in the winter light, standing like men.

Lauren and her father Niall live alone in the Highlands, in a small village surrounded by pine forest. When a woman stumbles out onto the road one Halloween night, Niall drives her back to their house in his pickup. In the morning, she’s gone.

In a community where daughters rebel, men quietly rage, and drinking is a means of forgetting, mysteries like these are not out of the ordinary. The trapper found hanging with the dead animals for two weeks. Locked doors and stone circles. The disappearance of Lauren’s mother a decade ago.

Lauren looks for answers in her tarot cards, hoping she might one day be able to read her father’s turbulent mind. Neighbours know more than they let on, but when local teenager Ann-Marie goes missing it’s no longer clear who she can trust.

In the shadow of the Highland forest, Francine Toon captures the wildness of rural childhood and the intensity of small-town claustrophobia. In a place that can feel like the edge of the word, she unites the chill of the modern gothic with the pulse of a thriller. It is the perfect novel for our haunted times.

My thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for the blogtour invite and to Doubleday Books for my gifted review copy of ‘Pine’ by Francine Toon

I had the funniest feeling that I would love this book when it started appearing in Book Twitter mentions-one look at the synopsis and I was hooked.

From the spare and deliberate use of language, to the use of the present tense to create an atmosphere of immediacy, everything about this book is a wonder.

Told in alternate persepectives , that of almost 11 year old Lauren and her father Niall, this is a folklore and gothic inspired tale of a small Highland village bordered by pine forests. Not only do the pines provide an identifying feature for the village, they also appear as ancient watchers, holding the secrets of what happens under their canopy very closely indeed.

What makes this so clever, for me, is that when Lauren speaks, the descriptions used are so specific that you can hear Lauren in your head. Her voice starts the book, and as such, the reader has to work to piece together what she is seeing on the night of Halloween-or Samhain-when a young woman appears from out of the trees, and then in the morning is gone again.

Echoing the disappearance of Lauren’s mother, when she was a baby, Lauren is full of questions, as is the reader, yet when the voice switches to Niall, no answers are forthcoming from him. Again,you are piecing together the details and hanging on every word. This drives the narrative forward whislt simultaneously creating a sense of foreboding and mystery.

It struck me, as I read, that the word ‘pine’ not only refers to the forests, but also is used as a verb which could define so many of the threads in this book-Lauren’s yearning for a mother that she creates out of the tarot cards her mum left behind, Niall’s hopes for a different life that he drowns in alcohol , all the easier to ignore the fact he is failing himself and Lauren.

The beauty in the use of words is there on every page for a reader to revel in. It’s a wonderful thing as you visualise Lauren flying in her bin bag cape as vampire, or the impregnable toffee apples given as treats. The dialogue is the same, phone conversations and use of dialect really help to place it as Scottish and aids the creation of a sense of isolation which envelops the reader.

By the end of it, you feel that you have become a part of a story so much bigger than yourself, the mystery is just part of the story, the telling of the histories of these people, and their superstitions and local legends, is the over arching theme. ‘Pine’ is a remarkable debut , told with subtlety, nuance and skill. I thoroughly enjoyed it and am excited to see what Francine Toon writes next.

And can we just take a moment to appreciate the beautiful cover? It’s absolutely stunning!

About the author…

Francine Toon grew up in Sutherland and Fife, Scotland. Her poetry, written as Francine Elena, has appeared in The Sunday Times, The Best British Poetry 2013 and 2015 anthologies (Salt) and Poetry London, among other places. Pine was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. She lives in London and works in publishing